2. Identify core team

Next you need to identify the core team. The core team is the beginning of your organization strategy, for structuring the initiative.

The core team is the small set of people who will be “in on it from the beginning”. They are people who are bought into the idea, and it should include both business stakeholders and experts in the essential strategies. Just as John Kennedy articulated the goal of going to the Moon, Wernher von Braun was the technical visionary for the strategy of how to get there. (In fact, the idea actually came from von Braun.)*

Dr. Kizzmekia Corbett, the lead scientist of the Moderna vaccine

Similarly, while many drug companies wanted to rapidly produce a vaccine for SARS-COV-2, Moderna was able to design one literally within two days of receiving the virus’s RNA sequence, thanks to the prior technical work of Dr. Kizzmekia Corbett, the lead scientist of the Moderna vaccine.

If the core team exists within a larger organization, then the team must eventually have representation, at least in an adjunct sense, from the major stakeholders who will be affected by the initiative. The initial team might be a subset: include those who will “get it” and help to convince the others who are needed.

A Foundation of Trust, Not Competition

The most important ingredient in a founder team is mutual respect and trust. Some founders make the mistake of trying to anticipate everything that might go wrong in a partnership and creating rules to handle those situations. While some rules are important, relying on rules will fail: you cannot anticipate all the things that will go wrong. Successful partnerships are those in which the partners trust each other and seek collective gain rather than individual gain. Be careful to pick partners who have that attitude.

Complementing Each Other

The core team members should complement each other’s knowledge and abilities. They need to each accept that the others are not like them: that different abilities and skills often go with different personalities and approaches to things. A core team must put a premium on the relationship among the team members, because differences of opinion inevitably arise, and compromise will be needed.

It is important to learn (1) how the others in the team work, and (2) what types of leadership each person naturally possesses. As you will learn, leadership is a complex topic: there are many forms of leadership. (See Engineering the Leadership.) At this early stage, it might be best to not “pigeonhole” people by concluding what types of leadership they are good at and what they are not good at. However, Peter Drucker’s famous division of people into “the outside person”, “the inside person”, and “the person of action” is very useful for understanding people’s strength at an early stage.

Simply put, an outside person who is someone who is good at representing the group to outside parties. They are usually charismatic, and are good at negotiating. An inside person is someone who has the respect of people in the group. Ideally that person has deep knowledge that is important for the effort, but they also behave in a way that others admire. Finally, a person of action is someone who keeps things moving: they put ideas into motion, and they notice gaps.

These basic characterizations help to decide what the members of the core team should be doing. But remember not to pigeonhole people too early — or ever. People can sometimes be one way in one context, and behave differently in a different context that interests them more.

It is crucial that a core team contain the range of leadership styles that will be needed to lead the organization. Consider who is the “outside person”, who is the “inside person” and who is the “person of action”. There can be overlap in these traits among people. If there is a significant gap, consider how to fill the gap, either through leadership coaching or recruiting additional members for the core team.

Defining Roles (Or Not)

Defining roles is often a good idea, but often it is not necessary. It depends on the people and how clear the tasks are. If things are unclear, then roles might be counterproductive; if the tasks to be done are very clear, then well-defined roles can help to organize who will do what.

Deciding on roles (or not) for the core team is the beginnings of an Org Strategy.

It will evolve over time, as the work becomes clearer. For now, simply decide on the issues mentioned above, to the extent that you are confident about your decisions. And keep decisions flexible, so that people’s roles can evolve — not randomly, but thoughtfully.

Timely Decision-Making

In business, time is everything. Well not everything, but almost! If you rely on consensus for every decision, then decisions will languish. Recall Peter Drucker’s “person of action”: someone who pushes issues to quick resolution, perhaps making the final decision if there is no consensus.

It is therefore often beneficial to have one core team member who is the final decision-maker, unless you have a core team that is unusually in sync about things and all are “people of action”. But whoever makes decisions, it is crucial that they are innately open and inclusive and not autocratic. They also need to be issue-focused and not focus on their own ego or “being right”, and must not take it personally when there is disagreement. Good leaders don’t prioritize loyalty: they prioritize capability. In other words, the way that decision-making is done—the leadership style—is crucial. This is discussed more in the section on engineering the leadership style.

Shared Values and Ideals

It is important to establish a set of shared behavioral ideals very early, when the core team has been formed. We will visit behavioral norms again when we talk about engineering your culture, but setting the core beliefs within the core team first is essential.

The values are the core of what will become the initiative’s culture: that is, what behaviors are expected of people, and “how we do things”. This is a good time to start becoming familiar with an organizational culture model. An overview of organizational culture is here.

* You might say “Wait a minute!—that’s space travel, that’s different!” Except that it is not that different. There are technical and market uncertainties, and those must be resolved; and there is a lot of engineering, and testing, and trying the system or product in the real world to see how it performs, followed by “back to the drawing board” and making further refinements. In fact, the gradual refinement process used during the early days of the US Air Force and space program, which is used by SpaceX today, was and is far more successful than the big bang approaches adopted by contractors for the Space Shuttle. SpaceX has shown us that the space industry lost its way, and needs to get back to an agile process. Agile actually has a long history in system engineering!

More Info

Agile 2 behaviors and the cultural prerequisites

Constructive culture - book here

Agile 2 principles - book here

Startup Team Formation

EQ and Team Enthusiasm

Building a Coalition — How to bring other supporting stakeholders into the initiative

Change Agent Roles

These are two key roles that people can assume. They are not job titles:

Transformation Leader

Agility Change Agent

Some Important Principles

At this point some things are important to keep in mind. They are summarized below. We recommend that you read the Agile 2 book, because it discusses these topics.

Everyone should understand the whole value stream flow

For example, if your role is business development, do not assume that you do not need to understand how the product is being made — because you do. Nowadays the way that products are made is often as important as what the product is.

Consider the case of Amazon: their products are myriad, but what distinguishes them is not their products per se, but the way that those products are sold and delivered; and what makes that possible is the advanced software development methods that they use — they were pioneers of what today is known as the “cloud”.

To not understand how they do this is to not understand the pillar underlying how their business “ticks” — which would make it difficult to envision additional ways to leverage its abilities in a business context.

Be proactive - don’t rely on process

Agility is about how people behave, not process. Observe, ask questions, try to understand, generate discussion, push toward timely solutions that address both short-term and long-term. Don’t wait. Reach out — don’t “stay in your lane”. And when others reach out and say they have spotted a problem, be receptive — not defensive.

Neurodiversity

There is no “best way” for everyone to work, collaborate, communicate, or create. People are neurologically diverse. Some people communicate well through speaking, while others communicate well through writing. Some people need to think on their own, and others think things through with others. It is not a matter of preference: it is a matter of ability.

Development of people

As the saying goes, “To feed someone, don’t fish for them — instead, teach them to fish”. Developing people is the most powerful way to increase the speed at which you can accomplish things.

Further, people are most productive when they are motivated, and the most powerful motivators involve how people feel — their level of inspiration and hope, their feeling of being valued and respected by others around them, and their feeling of agency and control over their day.

Going “end to end from the beginning”

The time to arrange things for speed is at the beginning. It is often very difficult to go back and undo early decisions. Consider New York City. The streets of the old part of New York are arranged seemingly at random, because they were created without any forethought long ago.

As a result, to drive through that part of the city takes a long time. Undoing that would require tearing down all of the buildings, which is not feasible. The time to think of the layout of the streets was when they were created. Later parts of New York City are more organized, and since the traffic lights are synchronized, one can travel a large distance very quickly, assuming that one is not in rush hour traffic.

This is not an argument for trying to design everything at the start: rather, it is showing that one should always be thinking of the consequences of a decision in terms of whether it will enable one to go faster in the future. Pay now or pay much more later.

Synchronizing early and often

When many people work on overlapping things, they eventually need to synchronize their work. The more frequently they synchronize, the easier each synchronization is. If you wait too long, synchronizing might not even be possible, because have diverged so much in their respective approaches.

Consider for example if five people are working on a physics textbook together, and each is writing a separate chapter. They collaborate to create an outline, and then each start writing. While writing chapter 1, the author decides to use “MKS units”, which is a set of units of measure that include the meter, the kilogram, and the second.

Meanwhile, the author working on chapter 5 chooses to use “CGS units”, which consist of the centimeter, gram, and second. Having inconsistent units the book will be very confusing for the reader, and so the sooner the authors can review each other’s working drafts the sooner that they will realize that they need to collectively decide on a set of units — either MKS or CGS.

You might think that they should have thought of this early on, but in any complex creative endeavor there are myriad issues like that which arise and cannot all be anticipated ahead of time. That is why it is important to synchronize with team members frequently.

Focus on demonstration of capabilities - not tasks

When someone is given a task to do without understanding the purpose of the task, they will follow the instructions literally. The result will often be poor, because anything that was left out of the instructions will not be anticipated.

But if someone is told to solve a problem, they understand the situation, and they will perform tasks to solve the problem. They do not need detailed instructions: they have clear criteria for what the problem is.

That’s why planning in terms of creating capabilities is so powerful. If you plan to create a new capability, people are free to think of the many ways to accomplish that: the problem they are solving is How to create that capability, and they are not locked into the approach specified by a task.

Make plans in terms of creating capabilities, not in terms of tasks. This is explained in Step 5, Identify the optimal sequence of capabilities to demonstrate or release.

 

—> Step 3

Step 1 <—